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youtube corporate

Youtube Inc. on politics

Summary (posts follow):

As a corporate entity, Youtube seems to have an agenda that generally supports illegal/massive immigration, and that might be due to the financial interests of their corporate parent Google in having a large supply of lower-cost engineers.

The Youtube Sockpuppets Project seeks to find out if politicians and other groups are using fake accounts to comment on that site's videos.
The term "sockpuppets" (see the link) refers to fake user accounts designed to mask someone's affiliation, promote something as if it's more popular than it is, and so on. I've long suspected that some comments left on certain political videos were from one person or group controlling several fake accounts.

Tonight Fox News will be conducting a GOP debate in conjunction with Youtube, with some of the questions to be asked having been submitted via Youtube. Feel free to leave comments below before, during or after the debate. This post will be updated after a transcript becomes available. This debate stands to be just as bad and as much of a public disservice as all the others, especially considering the involvement of Youtube.

Yesterday, Steve Grove of Youtube interviewed Barack Obama with a series of questions that users had submitted through the "Ask Obama" event. The Youtube interview was a scam; see that link for the details and the backstory.
To further drive home just how much of a scam it was, Grove appears to have undercut the implied rules of the competition by choosing an unpopular video as the only question about immigration. However, that video just happens to have been uploaded by an organization that's partnered with Youtube.
According to the implied rules of the competition, Youtube visitors would...

[UPDATE: Make sure and see this too]
Youtube and Barack Obama are conducting yet another scam, soliciting questions for Obama based on the State of the Union that he'll answer on Thursday, January 27. Other users vote up or down submitted questions, and then Obama will answer the top vote-getters.
The questions that get the most votes will invariably not be the best questions, the ones that Obama should be pressed on. In fact, they're likely to be some of the weakest questions of all. Obama and all other politicians should be "cross-examined" over their policies, and this latest scam will not...

One of the main goals of this site is to hold politicians accountable. Google Moderator and similar systems go in the opposite direction: they've let a long series of politicians off the hook and in most cases they've even made it easier for politicians to mislead.

Youtube now lets video uploaders create Google Moderator polls attached to their videos; Moderator lets users submit questions (or comments) and other users can vote up or down those user-submitted questions. In the past, Google Moderator and similar systems have been used by politicians to avoid being asked tough questions, and those who take advantage of this new capability need to make sure to only use it for situations where it's appropriate.

Earlier today, Steve Grove - Youtube's director of news and politics programming - interviewed Barack Obama live on Youtube (and on the White House's live feed) and asked him a series of weak questions that he answered with ease. Some or all of the questions he was asked were submitted by Youtube's visitors, very few of whom are familiar with specialized topics and with asking tough questions.

Google is going all out to present a one-sided view of global warming, not even acknowledging that some might disagree. On www.google.com at post time there's a prominent link called "Explore impact of climate change on Google Earth"; clicking the link brings you to google.com/landing/cop15:
Explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet Earth and learn about solutions for adaptation and mitigation, in the context of the United Nation's Climate Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen. With Google Earth you can view climate change scenarios, interact with narrated tours, investigate...

Arne Duncan of the U.S. Department of Education writes (ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html):
...President Obama announced that on September 8 - the first day of school for many children across America - he will deliver a national address directly to students on the importance of education... This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation's school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to...

Steve Grove of Youtube writes (youtube.com/blog?entry=20h2yiH79Tc):
President Obama is taking your questions this Wednesday in a special online health care town hall event. With health care at the top of the President's agenda, he is opening up the White House to questions via YouTube... He'll answer some of the most popular questions during the event, which we'll stream live from the White House YouTube channel.
In a word, this is a sham. And, it's similar to all the other shams that Youtube, CNN, Obama, and others have conducted for the past couple of years; see the popular voting systems...

On the attached video, Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln responds to citizen input on the SAVE Act and her related push to increase volunteerism. This is part of the Youtube effort called "Senate Hub" in which users submit questions which are then answered by various senators (youtube.com/user/senatehub).

Back in December 2008, Youtube established the Orwellian-named "Abuse and Safety Center" (youtube.com/t/safety), an online tool that can be used to report threats, spam, and other forms of legitimate abuse. However, they also have a section dealing with "Hateful Content", and for that they've joined with the Anti Defamation League (help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?page=&answer=126264&master=hatefulcontent).

There's a discussion of that here, including two videos side-by-side: one from the rightwing side that was deleted by Youtube, and an apparently similar one from the other side that was not. I haven't looked into it, but there are also a series of videos here, some of which may have been deleted by Youtube.

Youtube and the World Economic Forum have teamed up as they did last year, seeking user-generated answers to four setup questions on ethics, politics, the environment, and the economy (youtube.com/user/thedavosquestion).

For the backstory, see Shock: Youtube/Pulitzer contest has pro-illegal immigration puff piece as finalist. That same worthless, illegal immigration-supporting video (link) is now one of the five finalists in the Pulitzer competition and is #20 on Youtube's Featured list. Either because of that or because of creative counting, its views have jumped from around 700 a couple days ago to over 60,000 currently.

Please compare these two videos of children singing to their leader. If you aren't scared of Barack Obama and his followers now, it might just change your mind [SEE THE UPDATES; 'SING FOR CHANGE' REMOVED THE ORIGINAL VIDEO]:

The "Open Debate Coalition" - a group consisting of people such as Glenn Reynolds ("Instapundit") and Stanford law professor Larry Lessig [1] - is calling on John McCain and Barack Obama to open the presidential debates by allowing questions chosen by regular people and not just the MSM.
However, what they support has not only been proven to be a failure, but two of the signatories helped show how such formats can be gamed and another was involved with the system that was gamed.

Youtube's "Citizentube" (citizentube.com) apparently doesn't want to hear from citizens, because that blog where they post promos for Youtube's political ventures has stopped allowing comments on their entries. They used to allow comments, but they've even gone as far as deleting all comments which were left on their past entries.
I blame myself, since I pestered Youtube's Steve Grove by leaving the three comments in the extended entry, none of which are there anymore.

Filmmakers Eric Byler, Annabel Park, and Jeff Man run "9500Liberty", a pro-illegal immigration online documentary project discussing issues in northern Virginia (youtube.com/user/9500Liberty). In the past they've resorted to re-re-re-repurposing supposedly controversial comments from an older white gentleman in an attempt to racially demagogue the issue, but now they're back with a new video called "IMMIGRATION Crackdown HURTS Our Economy" (link) featuring the thoughts of supposed professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, Stephen Fuller.
Like their other efforts, the video is...

The World Economic Forum and Youtube appear to have joined forces and are requesting that Youtube users submit questions for the Davos event to be held next year (youtube.com/thedavosquestion). One or more top-rated videos will be selected and screened for the attendees, and then the attendees will deign to provide responses. The user videos should answer the following question:
"What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"
Then, starting January first, visitors will vote for their top choice. (Since coming up with a...

Youtube and/or CNN censored the list of video replies to their raw footage of the recent CNN/Youtube GOP debate.
On November 29, 2007 I uploaded two highly critical videos about the previous night's debate, and added them as replies to two of the CNN/Youtube-provided videos. My videos were in the list of replies for between one and three days, but then sometime on or before December 1 were deleted from the list. (Note: the videos themselves weren't deleted; they were only deleted them from the list of replies).

Part 1 is here.
At last night's debate, CNN gave Mike Huckabee so much time to demagogue college discounts for illegal aliens that they didn't give Mitt Romney enough time to make the essential point that what Huckabee supported would have deprived U.S. citizens of college discounts.
They also failed to do their research and realize that there's already an existing federal law (Title 8, Chapter 14, Sec.

Analyzing all the ways that CNN and Youtube are trying to lead America astray with their bogus "debates" would take a tremendous amount of time. So, I'm just going to look at two of the ways (Part 2 is here).
The first is keyed to this video, the question asking the candidates to pledge to oppose any immigration bill containing amnesty.
CNN should not have selected that question because no one who supports amnesty calls it amnesty.

[UPDATE: Videos showing how CNN went wrong here and here.]
1. Huckster really showed how to demagogue, changing what appeared to be a question about giving illegal aliens college discounts into an answer generating pro-military applause. Romney made the important point that there's only so much money to go around... that is, before CNN had to move on to the next question.
2.

The second Youtube/CNN debate will be held on Wednesday, November 28, and I can tell already it's going to be as bad - if not worse - than the first one. They'll ask a series of lightweight questions, and throw in a few humorous entries designed to portray those on the internet of being wacky (in contrast to the "serious journalists" at CNN).

A documentary about the immigration situation in Northern Virginia from independent filmmakers Eric Byler, Annabel Park, and Jeff Man is currently being serialized on the web: youtube.com/9500Liberty. Nick Miroff of the Washington Post promotes it in "Raw Look at Immigration Crucible". Both he and a member of the local Minuteman Civil Defense Corps say they're balanced. However, a glance at the videos casts a great deal of doubt on that, and Miroff admits that both Byler and Park volunteered for the James Webb campaign. In fact:
"Watching George Allen look into the camera and point and say...

Rudy Giuliani claimed that he'd never heard of the "NAFTA Superhighway" but his law firm is deeply involved in the Texas leg of the project.
Here's a relatively mild question I put together for the upcoming CNN/Youtube debate about that discrepancy; please go to his campaign appearances and try to ask him this question:

I give up. Well, not really, but that's how I feel after watching some of the submissions for the Youtube/CNN Republican debate (to be held at some unknown future date). As with the Democratic version, expect CNN to pick the worst of the worst in order to a) not make the candidates uncomfortable, and b) not make CNN's standard questions look as weak as they are.
While Dr.

Mitt Romney is apparently going to pull out of the next CNN/Youtube "debate" because he doesn't want to answer questions like those from snowmen. Rudy Giuliani is likewise unsure. Hugh Hewitt thinks it will turn into a chance for CNN to ask a series of leftwing questions, and is suggesting against taking part.
A look at the questions for the debate submitted so far shows that they have little to fear. Unless, of course, they're afraid of asking a question from a hot dog (link).

The Youtube/CNN debate sucked. The questions that CNN selected were little different from what MSM hacks would have asked; the videos from "average citizens" were little more than props. Of course, that's to be expected: if CNN had selected any of the small number of tough questions, it would have revealed them and the rest of the mainstream media for the corrupt hacks they are.